Google Home (2016)

Google Home is a $129 voice-controlled speaker with the Google Assistant. I helped conceive the product in 2015, and drove the design of the hardware, packaging and software, as well as helping to define many of the features, including how to play and control music across all the speakers in a home, and how to play and control TV shows.

Status: Launched October 2016, stocked out at Christmas, outsold expectations and the Amazon Echo in its first quarter on the market.

Google Chromecast

Google Chromecast is a $35 media streaming device for TV, and Chromecast Audio works for speakers. I proposed the project when I started at Google in 2011, and drove the design of the hardware and software, as well as the Google Cast interaction model for multi-screen control of movies, music, games, photos, and many other kinds of applications. Our talented engineering and PM team executed the challenging technical aspects, and we were lucky to have Google's very capable marketing team to help make it successful.

Role: Design Director responsible for all hardware, software, and packaging design for V1 and V2.

Status: 20 million sold in first 2 years, 50+% market share in every country it's sold (28). One of the fastest consumer electronics products to 10M sales ever (tied with iPhone). Won every major design award: Red Dot, G-Mark, IDA, and Good Design.

Chromecast and Chromecast Audio

Product video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX6Kkq7hPJY

Google Doodle announcing new Chromecasts

Content Guide in Chromecast App

Backdrop - ambient art, news, events, photos and more

Water Elemental from a Cast game we designed

Original Chromecast (not actual size)

Chromecast packaging

Netflix running Cast UI (top and bottom)

Chromecast: For Bigger Blazes

Example of TV ad for Chromecast

Google retail space with our Chromecast demo

Google - passion projects

I'm not on the self-driving car team, but transportation, energy, and access have been passions of mine since I was a kid building go carts, electric RC cars, and solar ovens, and designing energy efficient houses.

At Google, I was inspired to think about how a self-driving car would identify its passengers, how it would help them get on board in the rain with luggage and over curbs, and how it would build a sense of trust. I sketched out a few ideas and shared them with the team.

I've been recently working with the AndroidOne team to design some elements of the Android experience for emerging populations in Africa and India, for whom the smartphone will be their first and only computing device. I'm also designing and helping build a Worldreader book reader app for AndroidOne. Can't share this work just yet.

And I'm an avid pilot, and constantly thinking how to make flying more accessible and safe.

Google TV - V3

I joined Google in 2011 to lead the design of Google TV version 3. Earlier versions had issues, but V3 was what V1 should have been: the seamless integration of broadcast TV and the web. I focused on the Home screen, the Guide, and Voice search. Voice search in particular was great for the time; you could ask for "1964 Oscar winners" and it would return watchable movies across dozens of sources. Seems like old hat now, but at the time is was fairly magical.

Role: Director of Design - led the conception and design of the platform and all apps, including Primetime (the guide), Search, Voice, and YouTube, with a team of 10 designers/researchers.

Moto Razr

At Motorola, I was responsible for the software design of all mobile products, including the return of the Razr brand applied to Android smartphones, which was a big deal for Motorola since the original Razr had been so successful. At the time, we modified Android heavily and built our own homescreen, dialer, communications, camera, widgets, and media apps. Many of these apps were better than vanilla Android at the time, but after the acquisition, Google caught up.

Role: VP Design, managed team and led the design of all software projects (100 person team).

Status: Shipped first Razr smartphone and first Android tablet. Motorola increased to 11% market share based on these products.

Motorola Razr with new home screen

Converged devices portfolio of products

NFC gaming

Moto Actv G2 Smart Watch

Responsible for the software design of the first Android smart watch by Motorola, called the G2 Fitness Watch. We conceived this as a "remote widget display" for your Android phone, where you install a watch widget on your phone, and it appears in a carousel on the watch. Visual and haptic feedback were used for notifications, map navigation, fitness information, and pretty much anything Android could do. This was the predecessor of the Moto 360 watch.

Status: Shipped in 2011, several years before the Android watch craze began.

Worldreader.org

Helped start this non-profit organization in Barcelona, which aims to put a library of books into the hands of every child in the developing world using e-readers like the Kindle. Worldreader.org has since grown into one of the most impactful literacy NGO's in the world, with more than 2 million books read. Learn more at worldreader.org.

Role: Director of Trials, designed and ran the first e-reader trials in the world (Ghana and Barcelona), wrote iRead whitepaper documenting findings.

Status: Deployed in 39 countries, 340,000 active readers, over 2 million books read. Currently funding and designing an Android reader.

Teaching a 7-grade class in Ghana to use e-readers

With Colin and David and the kids in Ayenyah village

Talking to teens in Ghana

E-reader trial white paper

Class with Kindles

Kids showing books to their parents

Training material from Ghana trials

Adobe Creative Suite CS3 and CS4

Design of Creative Suite 3 and 4, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and Flash. Created 5 year vision, challenging team to make pro tools that are as approachable and inspiring as Apple would imagine. Themes: Pro Efficiency, Success Sooner, and Inspire Creativity.

Role: VP Product Design at Adobe, co-managed team responsible for design of the Creative Suite and all other Adobe software (100 person team).

Status: CS3 outsold all expectations, and CS4 also did well. See Adobe website for more information on the Creative Suite.

Photoshop - new workspace layout

Photoshop - new n-up view

Photoshop - new visual stylesheets

Photoshop - new visual variations

New quick-access tool wheel

Feature search

Macromedia Dreamweaver V1-V4

Macromedia (now Adobe) Dreamweaver is a pro web design tool that supports sophisticated visual design layout with templating, application coding and debugging tools, and site management. Insight that drove its success: professionals wanted visual layout, while maintaining full control over the way their code was written.

Role: Lead designer for versions 1 and 2, coded much of the UI, managed development team for versions 3 and 4

Status: V1 shipped in 1997, and by version 4 it had 90% market share and has now made well over $1 Billion.

Dreamweaver MX - our first studio

Dreamweaver v3 interface

Dreamweaver home page

Unfortunate victim of marketing

Visual layout tool

The "19 Dreams" that started it all

Adobe Photoshop.com

Photo editing and sharing application designed for novices and built in Flex. One of Adobe’s first shipping cloud-based applications.

Role: VP Product Design at Adobe, helped conceive and design version 1.0, and advocated for moving Adobe desktop tools into the cloud.

Status: Deployed on web, iPhone, and Android, still under active development

Sign in page with community photos

Photoshop.com Editor

Visual Hue variation tool

Flash-based Slideshow - one of many options

Adobe NovaK Social Phone

We designed and prototyped a touch-screen-based "social phone" in 2007 - the year the iPhone came out - which brought people and content to the surface, rather than the static "app launcher" model of the iPhone. iOS and Android are only just now catching on to this kind of content-centric design (he says with modesty).

Role: Senior VP Design, helped conceive the project, but a most excellent designer on the team named Josh did the actual design and prototyping.

Status: Presented to CEO and board, but Adobe was unwilling to make the leap into hardware at the time.

Tour of California Race Tracker

At Macromedia, this was one of dozens of projects our XD team built, to learn how to design new rich web experiences using Flex. First designed and built in 2006, this app was a live tracker for the Tour of California bike race, which integrated GPS trackers on the top riders, live video feeds from motorbikes and chase cars, Navtek satellite maps, elevation and distance data, and crowdsourced photos, to create a "better than the real thing" experience on the day of the race. Nobody was doing apps like this in those days, so we learned a lot, especially about how to integrate live and crowdsourced data.

Role: Senior VP Design, helped conceive and design app, stayed up past 5am for a full week coding some of the video integration pieces.

Status: This app was used by the Tour from 2006-2008, and then was copied by other tours.

Samsung Living World

At Macromedia in 2005 (2 years before iPhone), we came up with and prototyped this idea called "Living World", where the background of the phone became the "living" dialer, incoming phone calls were scrawled as graffiti on a brick wall, planes drew names in the sky, and notebooks etched messages in colored illustrations. The images don't do this justice - the working phone prototypes were beautiful.

Status: Samsung built feature phones based on this idea, called the "Executive Phones", with beautiful Japanese artwork.

TED Conferences

At Macromedia, starting in 2005, our team designed and built the TED Conference website, program guide, and the "Intro Networks" application to introduce people to like minded thinkers. Interestingly, we thought people would like the "pins" to show people similar to themselves, when in fact, the most popular match-ups were with people who were very different from you, so we inverted the visualization.

Status: Used for years by TED, and IntroNetworks spun off into its own company, which still makes software for conferences and companies. I also got free passes to TED for many years!

TED Conference home page, circa 2005

TED Program Guide

IntroNetworks showing "pins" in quadrants of relatedness

Macromedia Breeze web meetings

Macromedia Breeze (now called Adobe Connect) is a fully customizable enterprise-class live web presentation and webinar service. This has even been used by President Obama in his live web addresses. We started Breeze back in the day when we added video to Flash, and we were the first to do web-based streaming video meetings with integrated whiteboard, chat, and thousands of simultaneous viewers. Ten years later, this still holds up as a best-in-class web presentation experience.

Team play

Teams perform better if they play together, and play is a big part of creativity. Here are a few examples of offsites and team events, like the build-and-race go-cart day, paragliding, and hosting a Maker Faire booth each year.